Wednesday, August 31, 2011

The New Resentment of the Poor - NYTimes.com: "In a decade of frenzied tax-cutting for the rich, the Republican Party just happened to lower tax rates for the poor, as well. Now several of the party’s most prominent presidential candidates and lawmakers want to correct that oversight and raise taxes on the poor and the working class, while protecting the rich, of course..."

"The libertarian conspiracy is a fascist menace"-- Cannonfire: "... Lind exposes the right-wing's ongoing "big lie"propaganda campaign, which is designed to create the false impression that fascism was a left-wing phenomenon. This nonsense -- relentlessly pushed by Glenn Beck and others -- flies in the face of virtually every scholarly book ever written about fascist Italy and Germany. It flies in the face of every newspaper and magazine article about fascism printed during that period. Fascism had widespread support in the U.S. before Pearl Harbor -- and all of those supporters (Ford, DuPont, Hearst, McCormick, etc.) were conservative capitalists...."

Apparently some GOPers are calling for budget cuts ahead of any FEMA aid for the Northeast. Battening down the hatches « The Confluence: "...Can I just say that besides being mean-spirited and short sighted, I find this incredibly offensive to those of us on the east coast. The coast populations pay some of the highest taxes in the country and send more money to Washington that we get back. That money pays for farm subsidies and ethanol subsidies and wars we did not wish to engage in and all kinds of things that the “heartland” takes for granted. In fact, I’m tired of us always bowing and scraping to the holiness of the midwest and rural voters. They think way too much of their own self-importance..."

N.C. man killed by falling tree limb in Irene's first reported death:"... Update at 11:43 p.m. A North Carolina man killed by a falling tree branch is the first reported death from Hurricane Irene as the storm hits the U.S. mainland, the Associated Press reports. MSNBC reports that the accident occurred outside the victim's home near Rocky Mount, N.C., in the western part of the state..."

Military suicides linked to low Omega-3 levels - Los Angeles Times: "In a finding suggesting powerful psychiatric benefits for a component of fish oil, a study published Wednesday has linked military suicides to low levels of docosahexaenoic acid and found that service personnel with higher levels of DHA in their blood were less likely to take their own lives..."

Talk about crazy, and illustrating that excess is not just in the political realm, this post might become a high-water mark in sycophantic prose. I'm sorry but Jobs would not be a demigod without marketing and without Xerox's Smalltak (from which the Mac and Windows are cloned) and without Woz, the engineering genius who made several early Apple innovations possible. Stephen on Steve: The most important man on Earth • The Register: (And I didn't mention Sony's Walkman, which the iPod mob never seems to recognize.)

Big deficit for 2011, but some improvement on tap - Aug. 24, 2011:" The United States is still set to rack up large deficits in the next decade, but not quite as large as previously estimated. At the same time, economic growth is expected to be modest and the unemployment rate is likely to stay high for a few more years..."

Jon Huntsman Wakes Up - The Dish | By Andrew Sullivan - The Daily Beast:"... Keep it up. Huntsman has a prophetic role in this campaign if he chooses to adopt it: the truth-teller. His chances are so slim, he loses nothing by speaking this candidly. At the very least, he lays down a distinctive marker for 2016. At the very most, he could break out in New Hampshire if Romney falters."

Sunday, August 21, 2011

Wall Street Aristocracy Got $1.2T in Loans - Bloomberg:"...Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke’s unprecedented effort to keep the economy from plunging into depression included lending banks and other companies as much as $1.2 trillion of public money, about the same amount U.S. homeowners currently owe on 6.5 million delinquent and foreclosed mortgages. The largest borrower, Morgan Stanley (MS), got as much as $107.3 billion, while Citigroup took $99.5 billion and Bank of America $91.4 billion, according to a Bloomberg News compilation of data obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests, months of litigation and an act of Congress..."

Friday, August 19, 2011

I don’t have any patience for this crap anymore and I’m not going away « The Confluence: "...This is why the calls for Hillary Clinton to jump in are not going to go away. The buyer’s remorse has to do with the very reasonable expectation that Hillary would have been a lot more proactive than Obama was in January 2009. Do we really believe that she would have taken office and let the economy languish during her first year in office, that she wouldn’t have aggressively championed a bigger stimulus package and a mortgage program to help struggling homeowners? Can any of us see her getting the news from Christina Romer to ask for $1.2 trillion in stimulus and have her say, “Ehhh, that’s probably too hard to get through Congress. Let’s go with what Tim proposed and the market will take care of itself”..."

Dupuy: Forget Rick Perry — Mitt Romney is perfect for GOP - Pekin, IL - Pekin Daily Times: "...The first reason is he has five gorgeous, able-bodied adult sons who’ve never spent a day in the military. Actually, none of the as-yet announced Republican candidates have children serving in the military. We’ve been in two wars now for nearly a decade each and yet the all-volunteer force is entirely made up of Americans not spawned from GOP candidates. For the last 30 years at least, the Republicans have been relentlessly, uniformly hawkish — but mostly with other peoples’ children. This disconnect was made evident in the ‘08 election when soldiers donated money to candidate Barack Obama 6-1 over Sen. John McCain..."

Biggest blunder of any president? Apparently Will 'forgot' His Bush, the Texass Goober from Connecticut, the Daddy's Boy who put us into the World's Biggest Bad Debt with his Enron Scams, his no-bid contracts to corporate crooks, his tax give-aways to miullionaires, and his bleeding, Festering, unending, brutal Bush Wars, which cost us over $4,000,000,000,000, and still cost us $10,000,000,000 EVERY MONTH!

(/11 by itself is a greater disaster than all of the missteps by Kennedy.

And can YOU imagine the alcoholic frat-boy taking on Kruscshev? And WINNING, like Kennedy?

Georgie Will is just another trust-fund baby who has done nothing in his pampered life but criticize others. And he is alomost always wrong. just look at history."

Pork chops on a stick, fried butter, fried Twinkies, corn dogs and GOP Presidential wannabees « Uppity Woman: "...Now I don’t know about you, but I can’t imagine Newt Pillsbury Doughboy Gingrich eating pork chops on a stick, in fact, he kind of looks like a pork chop on a stick himself. So I don’t expect him to do very well in the poll. As it is, he already looks like a heart attack waiting to happen so I wouldn’t blame him if he is advised to avoid the Fried Butter. Not that he will. There’s a saying in the part of Corporate America I hail from: If you can’t manage your own self, how can you manage others?..."

The Hijacked Crisis - NYTimes.com: "...But there’s another emotion you should feel: anger. For what we’re seeing now is what happens when influential people exploit a crisis rather than try to solve it..."

Friday, August 12, 2011

"...But even before that, macroeconomists and private sector forecasters were warning that the direction in which the new House Republican majority had pushed the White House and Congress this year — for immediate spending cuts, no further stimulus measures and no tax increases, ever — was wrong for addressing the nation’s two main ills, a weak economy now and projections of unsustainably high federal debt in coming years.

Instead, these critics say, Washington should be focusing on stimulating the economy in the near term to induce people to spend money and create jobs, while settling on a long-term plan for spending cuts and tax increases to take effect only after the economy recovers..."

"...Grow up, Mr. Miller. A President can only be as strong as the constituency that enables him to overcome opposition through voting power. The center-left stayed home in 2010, and gave the TP the opportunity to take over the House, while making the Senate even more prone to filibuster by politicians who would rather see Barack Obama fail than see the country succeed. If you want success, you need to turn out and vote accordingly."

Governor Rick Perry: Big On Prayer, Not So Big On Charity: "...Yet Perry's money hasn't answered many prayers. A review of his tax records from the mid-1990s through 2009 show the governor has contributed very little to charity. When he has, Perry has given mainly to charities connected to his family, and even then, his donations have sometimes been slight. An analysis by the San Antonio Express-News in mid-June reported that of his $2.68 million, Perry "gave half a percent to churches and religious organizations, or $14,243...""

Wednesday, August 10, 2011

"...apparently these guys have never heard of Virgin, Space X, or several other countries who are developing the technology to build cheap, reusable ground to orbit vehicles...

i would have said that there's no possible way that the Teahadis could punch through the rock bottom if stupidity where they wallow...but i died a little inside when i read this article, because i've been proven wrong..."

"...In similar circumstances, Franklin D. Roosevelt offered Americans a promise to use the power of his office to make their lives better and to keep trying until he got it right. Beginning in his first inaugural address, and in the fireside chats that followed, he explained how the crash had happened, and he minced no words about those who had caused it. He promised to do something no president had done before: to use the resources of the United States to put Americans directly to work, building the infrastructure we still rely on today. He swore to keep the people who had caused the crisis out of the halls of power, and he made good on that promise..."

Monday, August 08, 2011

Bill Schneider: Will Republicans Get Obama Re-Elected?: "Democrats are waking up to a terrifying realization: there is nothing President Obama can do to get himself re-elected next year. Things look just that bad. On the other hand, there are plenty of things Republicans can do to get Obama re-elected. And they seem to be doing them..."

Sunday, August 07, 2011

Credibility, Chutzpah and Debt - NYTimes.com: "...No, what makes America look unreliable isn’t budget math, it’s politics. And please, let’s not have the usual declarations that both sides are at fault. Our problems are almost entirely one-sided — specifically, they’re caused by the rise of an extremist right that is prepared to create repeated crises rather than give an inch on its demands..."

Saturday, August 06, 2011

The Madman Theory - NYTimes.com: "...Spending on social services doubled, and military budgets actually decreased. He oversaw the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and the Consumer Product Safety Commission. His administration was the first to encourage and enable American Indian tribal autonomy. He quadrupled the staff of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, almost tripled federal outlays for civil rights and began affirmative action in federal hiring. He supported the Equal Rights Amendment and signed Title IX, the law granting equality to female student athletes. One of his Supreme Court appointees wrote the Roe v. Wade decision..."

"...My conservative friends argue that the policies of Barack Obama are responsible for the horrifying length and depth of the economic crisis.

Question: Which policies?

Obama’s only tax increases – those contained in the Affordable Care Act – do not go into effect until 2014. Personal income tax rates and corporate tax rates are no higher today than they have been for the past decade. The payroll tax has actually been cut by 2 points. Total federal tax collections have dropped by 4 points of GDP since 2007, from 18+% to 14+%, the lowest rate since the Truman administration.

If so minded, you could describe Barack Obama as the biggest tax cutter in American history..."

To Escape Chaos, a Terrible Debt Deal - NYTimes.com: "There is little to like about the tentative agreement between Congressional leaders and the White House except that it happened at all. The deal would avert a catastrophic government default, immediately and probably through the end of 2012. The rest of it is a nearly complete capitulation to the hostage-taking demands of Republican extremists. It will hurt programs for the middle class and poor, and hinder an economic recovery..."